Two Comments on 'Open'

[glen ropella]

http://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2013/09/two-comments-on-open.html

"To me, open isn't about the money (and it's precisely when it *does* become about the money that it becomes converted and corrupted). Open is about creating and sharing. Open isn't about elite universities and 'the best professors in the world'. It's about everybody being able to be a learner, and a teacher, and a member of the community."

I found that comment interesting.  I hadn't given much thought to the fact that many of these courses are being subsidized by the 1% (ultimately the alumni and students who can afford tuition at the decidedly not open universities Harvard, Stanford, and MIT, as well as mega-corporations).  It goes back to our conversation on the motivations companies like Intel and Oracle might have for supporting open source.

I recently found myself arguing with someone who claims to be "anti-state" about the definition of government.  It seems patently obvious to me that a corporation is a form of government (which is part of why anarcho-capitalism is a ridiculous concept).  I think of them (the well engineered ones, anyway) as tools to achieve objectives that cannot be achieved by the more inertial, stumbling, things we normally call "government".  The fundamental difference, it seems to me, is that most of what we call government is tied to geography, even if indirectly.  It would be odd, for example, if your "county seat" just up and moved every few years.  But I don't see why that would be an entirely bad thing.  Most of the moves should be within the geographic bounds of the county.  But perhaps it would be useful for some rural county to move it's seat to the state capital, or even to another state, sporadically.

Interventions like that might make government a little more objective-oriented in the same way that corporations are often made more statist by being geographically bound.

--
⇒⇐ glen e. p. ropella
I took a check on all the meters in my room
 

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[Owen Densmore]

I think Open is about synergy.  I do something for free, you do too, and the synergy of the multiple systems becomes a positive sum game, and I can do a lot more via the collaboration.

Interesting view that corporations are a form of gvt.  Agreed!  Disney in florida is a quasi-county, with members on the city-county-state governmental organizations.

I wish folks could see the synergy thing.  If we don't provide for medical care for those who cannot afford it, we'll end up paying for the far more expensive emergency-room they'll eventually use.  Also, if they can't afford flu shots and don't get free ones, they will increase the probability of *my* getting the flu.

We're all the same pile of warm puppies.

   -- Owen

On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 9:49 AM, glen <[hidden email]> wrote:

http://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2013/09/two-comments-on-open.html

"To me, open isn't about the money (and it's precisely when it *does* become about the money that it becomes converted and corrupted). Open is about creating and sharing. Open isn't about elite universities and 'the best professors in the world'. It's about everybody being able to be a learner, and a teacher, and a member of the community."

I found that comment interesting.  I hadn't given much thought to the fact that many of these courses are being subsidized by the 1% (ultimately the alumni and students who can afford tuition at the decidedly not open universities Harvard, Stanford, and MIT, as well as mega-corporations).  It goes back to our conversation on the motivations companies like Intel and Oracle might have for supporting open source.

I recently found myself arguing with someone who claims to be "anti-state" about the definition of government.  It seems patently obvious to me that a corporation is a form of government (which is part of why anarcho-capitalism is a ridiculous concept).  I think of them (the well engineered ones, anyway) as tools to achieve objectives that cannot be achieved by the more inertial, stumbling, things we normally call "government".  The fundamental difference, it seems to me, is that most of what we call government is tied to geography, even if indirectly.  It would be odd, for example, if your "county seat" just up and moved every few years.  But I don't see why that would be an entirely bad thing.  Most of the moves should be within the geographic bounds of the county.  But perhaps it would be useful for some rural county to move it's seat to the state capital, or even to another state, sporadically.

Interventions like that might make government a little more objective-oriented in the same way that corporations are often made more statist by being geographically bound.

--
⇒⇐ glen e. p. ropella
I took a check on all the meters in my room
 
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

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[Marcus G. Daniels]

On 10/19/13 10:00 AM, Owen Densmore wrote:

I think Open is about synergy.  I do something for free, you do too, and the synergy of the multiple systems becomes a positive sum game, and I can do a lot more via the collaboration.

A project that is open can advance on many fronts at once without top-down coordination.  The challenge for a manager (or benevolent dictator) of such a project (Wikipedia, Linux) is to learn how to organize things so that they can get out of the way.   Too much planning puts `locks' on people and decreases concurrency.  To little, and quality may suffer with proliferating redundancy..

Marcus

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